A Curse

Lois blinked.

"Okay..." The reporter took a gulp of her drink. The thirst was upon her. "So you're a ghost?"

Ella Lane laid her hand on the table—and then her hand passed right through the table. Lois' eyes widened as she saw her mother's wrist, perfect and seemingly solid, apparently embedded in the tablecloth—and then the older woman brought her hand back up.

"Ectoplasm," she murmured. "If there's enough energy around, like here, I can manifest physically...but most of the time I'm little more than a nagging voice in the back of your mind, a figure you see in your dreams. Haven't you been thinking about me an awful lot lately?"

Lois had to admit that she had been thinking a great deal of her mother, ever since her last birthday. A gentle chiding here and there, the sound of her voice in her thoughts. The reporter had taken it as whispers of her biological clock, or echoes of eating too late at night. Now she wondered if it had actually been her mother all along.

"It's an old family curse," Ella said, sipping her own concoction. "I never got a chance to tell you about it, but my Nana told it to me and...well, the women of our family, when we reach a certain age, we get haunted by our mothers and grandmothers. Now I'm doomed to wander the earth until certain things happen. I'm afraid you're stuck with me until the conditions are fulfilled."

The reporter took a deep breath.

"Well...what do you need to rest?"

"Grandbabies." The old woman smacked her lips and refilled her glass—and Lois' too.

Lois blinked again.

"It is a very old, outmoded curse. Once you hit your thirties and you're childless, your female ancestors start chiding you to get pregnant. Completely ridiculous, you can imagine what it was like when the ghost of my Nana found out I was on the pill." She chuckled. "There I was in the middle of a sexual revolution and all the while I could hear her talking about what a nice young man that was plowing my hairy cunt. If I hadn't missed filling a prescription...and met your father..."

The reporter gulped down another drink, licking the salty stuff off her lips. If there was any **** in it, she wasn't feeling it at all.

"What about...Lucy?" Lois thought about her sister.

"Curse goes to the eldest first."

Lois swore under her breath.

"Mom, I...this just isn't a good time for me to get pregnant. I'm not even with anybody right now."

Ella raised an eyebrow. "I never said anything about getting married, young lady. But tell me, when was the last time you got fucked?"